CONTENT

Introducing

DECEMBER 2025

In her poem A Moment of Peace Jackie Morris writes,

peace flies on dove’s wings in quiet minds peace sings

In her poem The Wild Geese Mary Oliver gives us this context for her birds,

Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

The dove: Noah’s dove returning with an olive leaf, the dove of the Holy Spirit descending, or perhaps Picasso’s dove, created in 1949 for the first International Congress of Peace; the snow goose; and then there’s the crested crane of the African savannah, Uganda’s national bird, its elegant form a harbinger of peace in many other African countries. We seek with such wild creatures to symbolize the peace we crave. As Wendell Berry writes,

When despair grows in me…. I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things

When we look at fauna, we choose to name the pure white lily our flower of peace. This month’s STS, – the last issue overall of these blogs, since the year ends with the month of December reached – has taken PEACE as its theme. ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to all men’, the angels sing above the Nativity crib at Bethlehem. In a song about the Virgin Mary Caritas abundat in omnia (Love abounds in everything) Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1178) wrote, ‘To the highest King the kiss of peace she gave.’ The song can be found on her album, Kiss of Peace. Bingen was a German abbess of phenomenal intellect and outreach, a mystic and visionary, prolifically composing sacred music, writing both music and words. Listen to the clip below to hear how a soprano voice soars in its purity and, mantra-like in their repetition, Bingen’s lyrics soothe and uplift
We look to the power of words to solve things, or at the least, to provide solace. This month the STS PEOPLE section is given over to Karl Jenkins and his The Peacemakers album, music which contextualises an assembly of stirring declarations from those who have stood up to speak out as peacemakers for us across the ages. And in LITERATURE Paul Gallico’s vintage novella The Snow Goose, now a work a venerable 84 years old, demonstrates how a slim volume can say it all, that it’s not number of pages, nor range of characters and settings that make for the most convincing story or pack the most powerful emotional punch. Under ART, in this issue, as an STS first, a non-religious image takes pride of place. Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men by the Sea at Moonrise is a painting that sends one into oneself to question oneself, providing an opportunity to reflect how being in nature can gift us with the experience of the transcendental. Our PLACE section demonstrates how gardens, Italian in this case, whether real or made of shimmering mosaic, are where peace is found Finally, in NOTES & JOTTINGS: as a send-off we offer you an opportunity to extend your language skills in an important way

ART OF THE MONTH

TWO MEN BY THE SEA AT MOONRISE
by
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
1774 -1830

In the calendar:
Not specifically a religious painting, there is no calendar date to which this work is connected. Caspar David Friedrich (CDF) favoured dawn and dusk as the timeframes for many of his compositions. In this one we see a clouded sky in which a veiled moon rises over a flat expanse of water that’s been described as ‘moonstruck.’ The two men are well wrapped up and the work’s palette: ochre, shades of grey, brown and the black rocks of the beach suggest it as a winter scene.
The frame of reference:
CDF came of age at a time when Europe was turning from materialism, with a new appreciation of spirituality being expressed by artists such as J M W Turner. At art school he was taught that nature was a revelation of God. CDF was to develop a distinctly Romantic approach to landscape painting, focussing on the effects of light, as for example how the sun and moon illuminated water. Two Men by the Sea was painted in 1817, a year which was one of severe suffering for Germany, failed harvests and food shortages having resulted from the atmospheric disruption of a massive southern hemisphere volcano. It is suggested the light pollution experienced over a period of months is reflected in the pinkish palette used by CDF, which was perhaps a way for him to render elements of his vision of the apocalypse. 
The painting:
The canvas is a small one: 51 x 66 cms. It has been described as ‘a quintessentially spiritual Romantic painting,’ one which beckons the viewer to join the two standing, back-turned and silhouetted figures ‘in a wordless but deep emotional encounter with nature.’ They stand, their expressions closed to us, but evidently rapt in contemplation of the mystery and grandeur of an empty landscape, where an occluded moon rises above an expanse of darkly ominous sea.
The painting evokes the Romantic ideology of nature as a reflection of the soul – but lays itself open to interpretation as so much of CDF’s work does. The moon, not simply illuminating the landscape may suggest yearning, eternity, and the sublime, its ascension perhaps symbolizing the progress from life to death, or the striving of the soul upwards to the infinite.
Our gaze is invited into the painting by this barely-seen moon, which nevertheless is blurring the line between heaven, sea and shore. Do we empathise with the tranquillity of the scene which the two men have discovered, and do we conclude they are at peace, experiencing the brightening sky being ushered in by the moon as its blessing? Or are we more convinced that the mood of the work is intended as sombre, bleak. And that this portends the painting’s overarching message as despairing, the artist having transformed the shy moon into a metaphor of human failing, of the need for attention to be urgently directed to spiritual perception and metaphysical reflection?
The artist:
CDF’s story is one of extremes: a man who came from a lonely and tragic childhood to achieve great fame and the highest success and be considered the most important German artist of his generation, only to fall out of fashion and favour and die almost destitute. CDF’s talent was recognised early. Settling in Dresden in 1798 at the age of 24, he began to paint northern landscapes in what was seen as a new and challenging way, sketching on the spot and then working on his finely-tuned depictions of the effects of changing light, the sun and the moon. In 1808 his most renowned painting of The Cross in the Mountains, an austere portrayal of a cross set up high profiled against a great sky, startled his audiences, who asked whether landscape artistry belonged in religious settings. Elected a Member of the Berlin Academy in 1810 after the Crown Prince bought two of his paintings, CDF ran into political difficulties and began to distance himself from the mainstream art world. After marrying in 1818 his palette became brighter and lighter but as he aged, he fell further out of the public view. Isolated, he became a solitary and was ill for the years leading up to his death in 1840.
CDF’s often melancholy and isolationist view of the world linked with the strongly religious undertones of his work has always invited controversy. After a long period of neglect, last year, 2024, there was a series of major exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and New York and Weimar to mark the 250th year of his birth

LITERATURE

THE SNOW GOOSE
by
PAUL GALLICO
1897-1976

Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose was first published by Michael Joseph in November 1941. By 1946 when my edition, an illustrated version, came out there’d already been 17 reprints of the book. My copy has for full page colour prints by famed wildlife artist Peter Scott, its 55 pages also graced with many monochrome sketches and linocuts. Fiftyfive pages only with which to expound on how the horrors of war irrevocably smash fragile lives. Set primarily in an Essex wetland backwater, it was written by Gallico in the months immediately after WWII’s May/June 1940 evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches of Dunkirk, northern France. Here, at a key moment in the conflict, more than 338,000 soldiers found themselves pushed back to the coast. Cut off, they were potentially death-trapped as they became surrounded by the enemy German forces. Gallico’s hero, Essex countryman Philip Rhayader, was at the helm of one of the estimated 850 ‘little ships’ (of which some 200 were lost) that undertook the rescue mission. The boats, predominantly pleasure craft that were sailed across the Channel by volunteer civilians who had answered the Admiralty’s call for help on BBC radio, met heavy enemy fire, aerial attacks and mines. Rhayader is described as going again and again into the shallows with his light craft to take soldiers off and ferry them to the larger craft (20 Navy warships) waiting offshore. Despite the bombardment all around in the sky above, accompanying him in his selfless heroism – thereby becoming the stuff of legends – flies his ‘Princess’, the beloved snow goose of the book’s title. ‘If you saw the goose you were eventually saved,’ states one of Gallico’s servicemen Dunkirk survivor characters, lending the bird’s devoted presence at the evacuation scene an almost religious connotation. Rhyader’s Princess would have been an anser caerulescens, a species largely native to North America. According to Wikipedia the snow goose is a rare ‘vagrant’ to Europe (although there are current reports of a colony in Scotland.) The birds migrate north/south twice in a year, leaving in the spring from their warmer over-wintering areas. They fly in large flocks very high along narrow corridors of up to 5000 kms in length. Females are strongly ‘philopatric’ meaning they return for breeding to the place where they were hatched. The Snow Goose, written early in Gallico’s long career, firstly as a short story, rapidly revealed itself as a winningly tender account of unconsummated love between sympathetic characters. With the integrity of a timeless legend, it was perhaps his greatest critical success. And this despite the contemporary criticisms of over-sentimentality. Vouching for its emotional intensity, I defy you to reach its end without at least a thickening at the back of your throat. Sentimentality? – poetry and poignancy, rather! in my view… Because the novella has it all: love and courage, bravery and loss, loneliness and sacrifice, wild nature’s untameable beauty, conflict’s senseless brutality: a set of powerful themes conveyed with an unaffected, direct use of language guaranteeing one registers its symbolism. ‘Of epic scope despite its brevity’ is a good way to describe the novella. The Snow Goose, while almost anecdotal in its low-key mood, yet transmits the clearest message conceivable about the sanctity of peace. (This year, 85 years after the events Gallico described in first person testimony in his novella, The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships (adls.org.uk) organised a Commemorative Return voyage. More than 60 of the intrepid little ships have survived the passage of time, and the 21 May Channel crossing made by their proud flotilla was accompanied by many supporter vessels.)
PEOPLE

KARL JENKINS AND THE PEACEMAKERS –
uplifting words set to soul-stirring choral music

Karl Jenkins (b 1944) has a massive popular following among singers and audiences worldwide for his impassioned, stirring choral works. Of his composition The Peacemakers he writes that it is about ‘inspiration and solace for a time in need of both’ and is dedicated to the memory of all those who have lost their lives during history’s armed conflicts, and in particular, to innocent civilian victims. ‘The Peacemakers’ was recorded with the participation of one thousand singers, and premiered live at Carnegie Hall, New York on 16 January 2012. The video clip Karl Jenkins: The Peacemakers below gives a good sense of the logistics entailed in bringing such an ambitious programme into being

‘All religions, all singing one song: Peace be with you’, a line from a poem by the C13th Persian mystic poet Rumi, sums up the composition’s overarching ethos of universality and collaboration.
Jenkins writes, ‘When I composed an earlier Mass, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace for the Millennium, it was with the hope of looking forward to a century of peace. Sadly,’ he reflects, ‘more than a decade later nothing much has changed.’
This newer take, Jenkins’ sequel, is nevertheless a strong extolling of peace, in which he has transmitted his composition’s message through the words of an eclectic selection of individuals whose thinking across the ages about the importance of peace to humankind has remained inspirational.
Many of those whose words are heard on The Peacemakers are iconic figures whose speeches have shaped history and made their mark on the world in situations of conflict and/or rapid change.
We know of these figures through their political action, their humanitarian involvements, their writings. Some of the text comes from lesser known but nevertheless salient individuals with significant contributions to make.
Included are:
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mahatma Gandhi, The Dalai Lama, Terry Waite, Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, St. Francis of Assisi, Sir Thomas Malory, Rumi, President Nelson Mandela, Bahá’u’lláh.
Jenkins explains how he has placed some of the texts he selected from the speeches within a musical context embellished in such a way that it helps identify and enrich their origin, as for example:

  •  the bansuri (Indian flute) and tabla used for Mahatma Gandhi’s contribution.
  • the shakuhachi (a Japanese flute associated with Zen Buddhism) and temple bells, in that of the Dalai Lama.
  • African percussion in the tribute to President Nelson Mandela
  • echoes of the blues of the deep American South as well as a quote from Schumann’s ‘Dreaming’ for what’s heard from Martin Luther King
  • uilleann pipes and bodhrán drums in the ‘Healing Light: a Celtic prayer’

The Abrahamic religions are brought into the piece with the words of Jesus Christ; from the Qur’an; from Judaism; and from Russian Orthodoxy in the words of monk Saint Seraphim of Sarov; while Saint Francis of Assisi is included by association.
There are words from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, representing a homage to the oratory of Martin Luther King, who drew on the prophet Isaiah for his own prophetic 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, USA.
Words from poets who span four centuries of English verse, Sir Thomas Malory from the C14th and Percy Bysshe Shelley of the C19th, are also heard, as is the voice of Iranian religious leader, Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), the founder of the Bahá’í faith.
Jenkins notes that from our more contemporary period he has included quotations from the diary of Anne Frank, and that human rights activist Terry Waite CBE (b 1939) has contributed ‘some wonderful words.’
In harnessing words’ transformative power in this way, uplifting them into song, Jenkins has assured that any performance of The Peacemakers can, in itself, be seen as an act of defiance, unleashing its veritable onslaught of words directed with all the strength it can muster towards celebrating the cause of peace

PLACE

A Madonna casts her blessing on the waters of the Venetian lagoon from the southernmost
extremity of the garden on Giudecca restored by the Venice Gardens Foundation at the
Redentore, the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer

Underlining how vital is the role of gardens in delivering us peace, STS opened in January with an image of the Memorial Garden, a tranquil Garden of Remembrance, snow-covered, in Henrietta Park, Bath, UK. We conclude with two Italian gardens, separated in time by a thousand years. One is real, in Venice. I visited it a month ago and walked its paths bathed in brilliant autumn sun. The other is in Ravenna at the Basilica of San Vitale, a mosaic creation from 547, a work of such aesthetic achievement that its artistry has perhaps never again been matched. First, we are in Venice to celebrate a magnificent new garden, barely one year old, which is to be discovered behind the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redentore, on the island of Giudecca. The magnificently-domed church was built following Andrea Palladio’s design in 1577. The church was intended as a symbol of rebirth and gratitude for being spared from the plague of 1575-7 which had raged through the city, taking almost a third of Venice’s population. Its care was entrusted to the Order of Capuchin monks. Annexed to the church is the Garden Complex, a large expanse extending to Giudecca’s southern waterfront. Very recently – after being discovered neglected after the years and waterlogged by the flooding of the terrible acqua alta of November 2019 – plans were hatched by the Venice Gardens Foundation (venicegardensfoundation.org) for its rehabilitation. The entire area was plotted out into large rectangular beds with long gravelled allees between them. Standing now among its ordered beds, admiring the many young trees flourishing, and the abundance of blossoms, herbs and vegetables, having enjoyed the shade of the grapevine pergolas and admired the olive groves, it is hard to remember it’s just over a year since its 26 October 2024 opening. Volunteer gardeners are very much in evidence, the result of their work showing in the Gardens’ meticulous state of upkeep. The atmosphere is calm and hushed, almost reverential. Listening to the midday angelus ring out whilst enjoying the sounds of the lily pond’s tinkling fountain, the peace of the place is truly conducive to contemplation. There is a tiny chapel for meditation, and a café close to the water where lunches and coffee are served. The Garden is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday with the ticket price 12 euros.
In Ravenna the Basilica of San Vitale is one of a range of eight sites in the town which contain some of the world’s most important monuments of Early Christian art. You could spend a day and see all eight, or take a day for each of the eight – or devote a lifetime to studying and marvelling at them, given their intricacy and their decoration’s immanent beauty. Dedicated to Saint Vitale, a martyr burned alive for professing his faith, the Basilica is octagonal, an identical but much smaller version of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Its construction, commissioned by the Emperor Justinian (527-565) signalled the height of the Byzantine era with Justinian ruling the Christian Roman Empire as a potentate, leadership of Empire and Church consolidated in himself. Rome having been weakened since its invasion by hordes from the north, the Emperor had moved the base for his Church on the European continent to the east side of what today we know as Italy. He and his Empress, Theodora, instigated a programme of decoration of this and other sacred sites in Ravenna over a period of 22 years, bringing artists with skills in mosaic to embellish their walls and ceilings. In San Vitale the Emperor and Empress’ portraits are proudly displayed on the walls of the apse, alongside a large domed portrayal of Christ Theocrator, its narrative welcoming San Vitale to the panoply of saints. There are dynastic and dominance aims behind the portrayals, the manifestation of power and pomp an important motivation for their creation at a time when Justinian was embattled while trying to maintain control domestically as well as wage war against the infidel across his vast territory, dedicated to achieving a final eradication of paganism in the face of Christian supremacy. However, undeniably as an overarching theme of this and the other sites’ mosaic decoration there is beauty. There are rich clothes and adornments, shown to their best advantage of course, in the shimmering mosaic medium, each of the tesserae, of gold or bright colour, placed at exactly the right angle to maximise the reflection of light. But there are gardens too, many gardens, replete with symbolism in their elements, where borders of flowers and foliage flourish, where small birds dart among the pure white lilies and the red roses, and peacocks stroll – a veritable arcadian portrayal of the peace that heaven promises. Incorporated not merely for decoration but as a visual language to reinforce biblical narratives, these elements were specifically designed for the mostly non-literate congregations of the time. For example, the larger message of the spring flowers on their fresh green backgrounds in these mosaic gardens is a holistic one. Representing the circle of life and eternal rebirth in Christ, reminding believers of God’s creation, provision, and the promise of resurrection, inspiring hope and instilling the peace that ‘passes all understanding.’
NOTES AND JOTTINGS

STOP WAR - say ‘Peace’ in all languages!

The slogan above belongs to the campaign initiated by the Internet Internationalization (I18N) community, an organization which values diversity and human life everywhere.
In its manifesto I18N states,

‘The people of the world prefer peace to war – and they deserve to have it. Bombs are not needed to solve international problems when they can be solved just as well with respect and communication.’

As our farewell in this last NOTES&JOTTINGS we offer you the greeting ‘Peace.’
In a random medley of the world’s languages, one small word – readying itself to be one first small step towards better international understanding, more successful mediation.

    1. SOUTH AFRICA (Afrikaans) – vrede
    2. ALASKA – kinuinak
    3. ALGERIA – lahna
    4. AZERBAIJAN – sul
    5. CONGO (Bangi) – nyiEe
    6. CORNWALL – cres
    7. CORSICA – pace
    8. CZECH – mir
    9. DENMARK – fred
    10. EAST AFRICA (Kiswahili) – amani
    11. EGYPT – salam
    12. ESPERANTO – paco
    13. FIJI – vakacegu
    14. GERMANY (Middle High) – vride
    15. HAWAII – maluhia
    16. ITALY – pace
    17. INDIA (Hindi) – shanti
    18. ISRAEL – shalom
    19. KENYA (Kikuyu) – thayu
    20. KOREA NORTH and SOUTH – pyeonghwa
    21. LITHUANIA – taika
    22. MADAGASCAR (Malagasy) – fandriampahalemana
    23. AMERICA (Sioux) – wo’ okeyeh
    24. NORWAY – fred
    25. PAPUA NEW GUINEA – taim billongska
    26. PHILIPINNES (Tagalog) – kapayapaan
    27. POLAND – pokoj
    28. RUSSIA – mir
    29. SENEGAL (Mandinka) – kayiroo
    30. SPAIN – paz
    31. SUDAN – salam
    32. TURKEY – baris
    33. UKRAINE – spokiy
    34. WALES – tangnefedd
    35. WEST AFRICA (Wolof) – jamm